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Priya Srinivasan

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Priya Srinivasan is a performance studies scholar and performer who has lived and performed in Chennai, Melbourne, Los Angeles, Chicago, Shanghai, and more recently in The Hague and Amsterdam. Her scholarly and artistic work uses critical feminist performance and ethnography to explore the connections between Asian labor, migration, history, and performance. Srinivasan's first book "Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor" seeks to understand dance as labor, and dancers not just as aesthetic bodies, but as transnational migrant workers and wage earners who negotiate citizenship and gender. Her current project investigates Dutch colonialism and South Asian migratory performances remapping their linkages through historiography, ethnography, and contemporary artistic practices. She brings together South Asian bodily practices as research to inform her theoretical framings of the production of art under late capital, postcoloniality, and globalization. She continues to work as an experimental dance/theatre artist who uses Indian performance practices to understand the effects of migration, history, and power on gendered bodies. She has presented excerpts of her award winning book “Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor” in the hybrid form of “talking dances” at the University of Chicago, University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University, and Harvard University. She is a Visiting Associate Professor at UCR in Dance, and Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Priya Srinivasan has a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University; an MA in Dance from UCLA and a First Class Honors in Ethnomusicology from Monash University.